Through the fog of secrecy the Government has spread around the child abuse inquiry fiasco it is possible to discern two inept Government actions that have contributed to the shambles.
The first concerns the drafting of the terms of reference for the commission.
The Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, has said throughout this week that if the commission was to hear evidence on each of the 1,700 allegations that had been made to it, it would go on for eight to 11 years, and some €200 million would be paid out in legal fees, largely to lawyers representing alleged abusers.
It had not been the Cabinet's original intention for the commission to investigate each individual case, he says. Rather, Ministers had wanted an inquiry along the lines of the one set up in Queensland, Australia, in 1998.
That inquiry's remit was to determine whether "any unsafe, improper or unlawful care or treatment of children" had occurred in institutions or detention centres, and whether any breaches of the law had taken place in this regard.
It was to ascertain the extent, nature and location of abuse, and how it had been allowed to happen, rather than to examine individual cases.
But Mr Dempsey said this week that somewhere between the Cabinet determining in 1999 that this was how it was to proceed and publishing legislation in February 2000, it turned into something quite different.
The implication of this account is that having determined that it wanted the more general and shorter Queensland-type inquiry, the Cabinet - Minister for Education, Attorney General, Taoiseach, the lot - approved legislation setting up something else.
This is a truly extraordinary admission. How could it happen that a Government would want one type of inquiry and end up establishing an entirely different one?
"I never thought we were going to get into 1,700 trials," the Taoiseach said yesterday.
So why did the legislation allow for this? We have no means of finding this out due to the doctrine of Cabinet confidentiality.
The second apparently inept Government action concerns what happened when the Cabinet apparently noticed to its surprise that it had indeed sponsored legislation mandating the commission to do exactly what it didn't want it to do: to examine each and every complaint.
The Government responded last December by setting up a review of the commission's work in an attempt to speed it up. Mr Dempsey met Ms Justice Laffoy to discuss this. The Attorney General was consulted, victims' views were sought.
The review was supposed to take a couple of months but dragged on for close to six.
Ultimately, Mr Dempsey told us this week, he brought the heads of a Bill to reform the commission's operation to Cabinet for discussion.
But - and again we have Mr Dempsey's word for this - the Cabinet examined this plan, and decided that this was not the best way to proceed at all as it would not significantly shorten the work of the commission.
It decided that the whole thing would have to be examined again.
So the Government decided in 1999 that it wanted a general inquiry into child abuse in institutions but for some reason ended up setting up one that would inquire into specific cases.
Then when it saw this problem it sent Mr Dempsey off to review the situation. When he came back after six months' deliberation with a plan it decided this wouldn't solve the problem and he was to go off and organise another review.
And it's not over yet.
That review was to be announced in July, by which time a decision was expected in the case taken by the Christian Brothers challenging the commission's intention to name deceased, incapacitated or untraceable brothers alleged to be abusers.
This decision didn't come, and is now hoped for in October. It would be "prudent", says Mr Dempsey - probably correctly - to wait for that decision before framing legislation setting out how the commission will operate in the future.
That puts new legislation well into next year.
It is worth remembering that this merry-go-round only started spinning because of the State's shocking neglect of thousands of children in its care over more than a generation. Thousands were grossly abused and damaged for life. The State knew about the abuse, and continued to fund generously the childcare system in which it took place.
This carry-on over the commission is the State's response to that.
The victims have had to wait through the unseemly squabble over how much the religious would have to pay into the compensation fund, the painfully slow delivery to the commission of documents from the Department of Education and a series of changes of course by the Government.
Ms Justice Laffoy's letter resigning from the commission is still being kept secret. It will be released only when the Government has finessed a response to its criticisms.
There appears to be no means of holding anyone to account over the mess, or even of finding out what exactly went on.
The Government's restrictions of the Freedom of Information Act introduced earlier this year ensure the Cabinet papers on the matter will not be made public until 2033, by which time many of the victims will be dead.
But their children will be able to gain some understanding of the decisions that ensured their parents, abused as children, continued to wait for justice and closure into middle and old age.